About

Anna Ella Johnson
Born in Bath, In the united kingdom

The Walt That Never Was: A Biography in Absence
It is a well-known fact — at least among those who insist on knowing well-known facts — that The Walt That Never Was is one of the most significant contributions to music history never to have taken place. Its absence has not only enriched the cultural imagination, but also the budgets of several research councils, three doctoral programs, and an alarming number of post-doctoral fellowships. In this respect, the work has achieved what most actual compositions fail to accomplish: perpetual relevance without the burden of existence. The origins of The Walt That Never Was are, fittingly, contested. Some argue that it was conceived in Vienna in the late nineteenth century, emerging out of the shadows of Strauss and his imitators. Others situate it firmly in the twentieth, perhaps as a forgotten experiment of the Second Viennese School. Still others, bolder and perhaps less concerned with chronology, suggest that it belongs to no time at all, a purely theoretical waltz whose primary function is to generate secondary literature. Ironically, this last camp has produced the most publications. The academic apparatus surrounding the work is impressive.

Annual conferences convene to discuss its stylistic innovations, its formal structure, and its imagined reception. Papers are delivered with great solemnity, complete with musical examples that are, of necessity, entirely hypothetical. The absence of a score has not deterred scholars from producing elaborate analyses, often complete with diagrams, Schenkerian reductions, and, in one regrettable instance, a holographic reconstruction that collapsed midway through its premiere. One might suppose that such a vacuum of primary material would pose a challenge to academic rigor. The opposite has proven true. In a system where careers are measured not in contributions to knowledge but in the number of lines on a curriculum vitae, The Walt That Never Was has proven inexhaustible. Every unanswered question is the promise of another grant; every silence in the archive is another special issue of a journal. It is not an exaggeration to say that the work has single-handedly sustained at least two academic departments through otherwise lean decades. The pedagogy of The Walt That Never Was is equally striking.

Undergraduate modules on “Imaginary Musicology” routinely devote entire weeks to the waltz. Students, unburdened by the necessity of listening to an actual composition, are encouraged to “interpret the silence” and submit essays footnoting works that do not exist in editions that were never published. External examiners have consistently praised the intellectual creativity of this exercise, though some have quietly confessed to wondering whether they are paid to evaluate papers or to participate in a performance art piece that accidentally achieved accreditation. Graduate students, meanwhile, have found in the waltz an almost limitless dissertation topic. One PhD thesis explored its socio-political implications in interwar Europe, another its “sonic resistance” to capitalism, and yet another its influence on dance cultures of the global South. None felt compelled to mention that the waltz itself was entirely imaginary. Indeed, the omission was often treated as evidence of critical sophistication. To point out the absence of the work, after all, would be naïve; the true scholar knows that the object of study is secondary to the performance of studying it.

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the academy alone has profited. Funding councils, too, have discovered in The Walt That Never Was a reliable means of disbursing money without the risk of measurable outcomes. Projects to digitize the nonexistent score, to archive its fictional manuscripts, and to commission performances of silence under its name have all been generously supported. One particularly lucrative collaboration between three European universities resulted in a seven-volume critical edition consisting entirely of blank staves. The set retails for €499 and is currently out of stock. Critics outside the academy have occasionally raised objections.

Journalists, less patient with elaborate theories, have accused the scholarly community of indulging in collective delusion. Practitioners in the arts have wondered aloud whether the energy might be better spent on actual compositions. These criticisms, however, only reinforce the prestige of the waltz within academic circles. Like all successful research topics, it thrives on incomprehension from the outside world. To not understand it is to prove its sophistication; to understand it too quickly is to reveal oneself as unserious. In its own perverse way, The Walt That Never Was has become the perfect academic object: infinitely interpretable, eternally unresolvable, and fundamentally harmless. It demands no rehearsal space, no orchestra, no royalties. It cannot be reviewed unfavorably, for there is nothing to hear. Its bibliography expands while its subject remains unchanged, a scholar’s paradise where progress is measured by the multiplication of references.

One is reminded of Borges’s description of a map the size of the empire it depicts. The cartographers of The Walt That Never Was have produced a literature that vastly exceeds its subject, a sprawling academic continent built on a musical island that does not exist. If this seems absurd, it is only because one has not spent enough time in a faculty meeting. In the end, the biography of The Walt That Never Was is the biography of academic culture itself: a grand waltz of citations, danced in circles, set to music that never plays. It is the waltz we are all still performing, whether we admit it or not.